The Lord of the Rings Complete Set by J.R.R. Tolkien (First American)

J. R. R. Tolkien

ISBN 10: 0395193958 / ISBN 13: 9780395193952

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1974

About this Item

The Lord of the Rings Complete Set by J.R.R. Tolkien (First American) Square firm copies. The Fellowship of the Ring VG+; The Two Towers F; The Return of the King F. Minor tanning to pages. Bright dust jackets. The Fellowship of the Ring F; The Two Towers NF; The Return of the King NF. Minor tanning to jacket spines and rear panels. Not price clipped. Set includes: The Fellowship of the Ring, Sixteenth Printing; The Two Towers, Thirteenth Printing; and The Return of the King, Thirteenth Printing, [1963]. Fold out maps tipped into rear of each book. Seller Inventory # HCX21995-1

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Lord of the Rings Complete Set by J.R.R....

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston

Publication Date: 1974

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Near Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

Edition: First U.S. Edition.

Book Type: BOOK

About this title

Synopsis:

A one-volume collector's edition boxed and bound in handsome red leatherette with gold, green, and blue foil stamping, two-color text setting, and large format fold-out maps containing the complete texts of The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, and six appendices. One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them. In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell, by chance, into the hands of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. From his fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, Sauron's power spread far and wide. He gathered all the Great Rings to him, but ever he searched far and wide for the One Ring that would complete his dominion. On his eleventy-first birthday Bilbo disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest -- to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard, Merry, Pippin, and Sam, Gimli the Dwarf, Legolas the Elf, Boromir of Gondor, and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.

Review:

This is a single-volume edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which the hobbit Frodo and his elfish friends get swept up in a mighty conflict with the dark lord Sauron (who owes much to proud Satan in Paradise Lost), the monstrous Gollum, the Cracks of Doom, and the awful power of the magical Ring. The book's characters--good and evil--are recognizably human, and the realism is deepened by the magnificent detail of the vast parallel world Tolkien devised, inspired partly by his influential Anglo-Saxon scholarship and his Christian beliefs. (He disapproved of the relative sparseness of detail in the comparable allegorical fantasy his friend C.S. Lewis dreamed up in the Chronicles of Narnia, though he knew Lewis had spun a page-turning yarn.) It has been estimated that one-tenth of all paperbacks sold can trace their ancestry to J.R.R. Tolkien. But even if we had never gotten Robert Jordan's The Path of Daggers and the whole fantasy genre Tolkien inadvertently created by bringing the hobbits so richly to life, Tolkien's epic about the Ring would have left our world enhanced by enchantment. --Tim Appelo